Uploaded May 2025 | Updated September 2026, 6 hours ago
60 Years: Fascism Seminar Revisited
mosseprogram.wisc.edu/rome
10 January 2025
Session V: Images of Fascism
Raffaele Bedarida, "Exhibiting Fascist Art"
Moderated by Atina Grossmann
Responses by Mary Louise Roberts, Ofer Ashkenazi
Sponsored by:
George L. Mosse Program in History
American Academy in Rome
Sapienza Università di Roma
Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism
Leo Baeck Institute
Atina Grossmann is Professor of History at the Cooper Union in New York City. Relevant publications include Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (2007); Wege in der Fremde: Deutsch-jüdische Begegnungsgeschichte zwischen New York, Berlin, und Teheran (2012), and as co-editor, Our Courage/Unser Mut: Jews in Europe after 1945 (with K. Bohus, 2020). She is the co-editor (with A.Patt and A.Kramen) of a forthcoming volume of sources on “Jewish Displaced Persons in Occupied Germany.” Her current research focuses on “Trauma, Privilege, and Adventure: Jewish Refugees from National Socialism: Between ‘Orient’ and European Catastrophe” as well as the entanglements of family memoir and historical scholarship; Her most recent publication on the topic of “Jewish Refugees in Iran and India” is included in the volume Jews and Colonialism, ed. Stefan Vogt (2023).
Raffaele Bedarida is an art historian and curator specializing in transnational modernism and politics. An assistant professor or art history at Sapienza Università di Roma, he holds a Ph.D. from the CUNY Graduate Center, New York as well as M.A. and B.A. degrees from the Università degli Studi di Siena, Italy. Bedarida’s research has focused on exhibition history, censorship, and propaganda under Fascism and during the Cold War. He has also worked on cultural diplomacy, migration, and exchange between Italy and the United States. His most recent books include Exhibiting Italian Art in the U.S. Futurism to Arte Povera: Like a Giant Screen (2022); Curating Fascism: Exhibitions and Memory from the Fall of Mussolini to Today, co-edited with Sharon Hecker (2022); and Corrado Cagli: Transatlantic Bridges, 1938-1947 (2023).
Mary Louise Roberts is the emeriti WARF Distinguished Lucie Aubrac Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She earned a B.A. from Wesleyan University, an M.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, and her Ph.D. from Brown University. Her specialization is women and gender, France, and the Second World War. Her books include Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-De-Siecle France (2002); What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France (2013); D-Day through French Eyes (2014) and Sheer Misery: Soldiers in Battle in WWII (2021).
Ofer Ashkenazi is a Professor of History and the Director of the Koebner-Minerva Center for German History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He currently serves as the Vice Dean for Teaching Affairs in the Humanities. He is the author of four monographs that explore Jewish contribution to German “national culture” throughout the twentieth century. They include Weimar Film and Modern Jewish Identity (2012); Anti-Heimat Cinema: The Jewish Invention of the German Landscape (2020); and the forthcoming (co-authored) Still Lives: Jewish Photography in Nazi Germany. He has published articles and edited books on various topics in German and Jewish history, including memory culture in Germany and Israel; Nazi-related humor in Germany; Jewish youth in Nazi Germany; German-Jewish immigrants in Mandate Palestine; the German antiwar movement; and exile photography.
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In 1963, historian George L. Mosse led a landmark seminar at Stanford University, bringing together scholars from diverse disciplines and countries to analyze the history of Nazism and Italian Fascism, just eighteen years after World War II. Their discussions defined the early parameters of European fascism amidst the post-war era’s intellectual landscape.
Sixty years later, the George L. Mosse Program in History organized a multi-day conference from January 9 to January 12, 2025, to reassess fascism in the context of contemporary European movements. More than thirty scholars from the US, Europe, the UK, and Israel gathered to critically examine and redefine “fascism” in light of present-day populist, anti-democratic, illiberal, and authoritarian ideologies.
The 2025 seminar revisited earlier scholarly interpretations of far-right movements, initiated by figures like Mosse a generation earlier, while also reinterpreting fascism through the lens of current geopolitical and cultural realities. This approach expanded upon and revised existing understandings of the concept, while fostering new insights and historiographical directions. Following the seminar, the Mosse Program plans to publish two companion volumes: Fascism Then, featuring annotated proceedings from the original 1963 seminar, and Fascism Now, based on the 2025 seminar.
60 Years: Fascism Seminar Revisited
mosseprogram.wisc.edu/rome
10 January 2025
Session V: Images of Fascism
Raffaele Bedarida, "Exhibiting Fascist Art"
Moderated by Atina Grossmann
Responses by Mary Louise Roberts, Ofer Ashkenazi
Sponsored by:
George L. Mosse Program in History
American Academy in Rome
Sapienza Università di Roma
Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism
Leo Baeck Institute
Atina Grossmann is Professor of History at the Cooper Union in New York City. Relevant publications include Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (2007); Wege in der Fremde: Deutsch-jüdische Begegnungsgeschichte zwischen New York, Berlin, und Teheran (2012), and as co-editor, Our Courage/Unser Mut: Jews in Europe after 1945 (with K. Bohus, 2020). She is the co-editor (with A.Patt and A.Kramen) of a forthcoming volume of sources on “Jewish Displaced Persons in Occupied Germany.” Her current research focuses on “Trauma, Privilege, and Adventure: Jewish Refugees from National Socialism: Between ‘Orient’ and European Catastrophe” as well as the entanglements of family memoir and historical scholarship; Her most recent publication on the topic of “Jewish Refugees in Iran and India” is included in the volume Jews and Colonialism, ed. Stefan Vogt (2023).
Raffaele Bedarida is an art historian and curator specializing in transnational modernism and politics. An assistant professor or art history at Sapienza Università di Roma, he holds a Ph.D. from the CUNY Graduate Center, New York as well as M.A. and B.A. degrees from the Università degli Studi di Siena, Italy. Bedarida’s research has focused on exhibition history, censorship, and propaganda under Fascism and during the Cold War. He has also worked on cultural diplomacy, migration, and exchange between Italy and the United States. His most recent books include Exhibiting Italian Art in the U.S. Futurism to Arte Povera: Like a Giant Screen (2022); Curating Fascism: Exhibitions and Memory from the Fall of Mussolini to Today, co-edited with Sharon Hecker (2022); and Corrado Cagli: Transatlantic Bridges, 1938-1947 (2023).
Mary Louise Roberts is the emeriti WARF Distinguished Lucie Aubrac Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She earned a B.A. from Wesleyan University, an M.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, and her Ph.D. from Brown University. Her specialization is women and gender, France, and the Second World War. Her books include Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-De-Siecle France (2002); What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France (2013); D-Day through French Eyes (2014) and Sheer Misery: Soldiers in Battle in WWII (2021).
Ofer Ashkenazi is a Professor of History and the Director of the Koebner-Minerva Center for German History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He currently serves as the Vice Dean for Teaching Affairs in the Humanities. He is the author of four monographs that explore Jewish contribution to German “national culture” throughout the twentieth century. They include Weimar Film and Modern Jewish Identity (2012); Anti-Heimat Cinema: The Jewish Invention of the German Landscape (2020); and the forthcoming (co-authored) Still Lives: Jewish Photography in Nazi Germany. He has published articles and edited books on various topics in German and Jewish history, including memory culture in Germany and Israel; Nazi-related humor in Germany; Jewish youth in Nazi Germany; German-Jewish immigrants in Mandate Palestine; the German antiwar movement; and exile photography.
+
In 1963, historian George L. Mosse led a landmark seminar at Stanford University, bringing together scholars from diverse disciplines and countries to analyze the history of Nazism and Italian Fascism, just eighteen years after World War II. Their discussions defined the early parameters of European fascism amidst the post-war era’s intellectual landscape.
Sixty years later, the George L. Mosse Program in History organized a multi-day conference from January 9 to January 12, 2025, to reassess fascism in the context of contemporary European movements. More than thirty scholars from the US, Europe, the UK, and Israel gathered to critically examine and redefine “fascism” in light of present-day populist, anti-democratic, illiberal, and authoritarian ideologies.
The 2025 seminar revisited earlier scholarly interpretations of far-right movements, initiated by figures like Mosse a generation earlier, while also reinterpreting fascism through the lens of current geopolitical and cultural realities. This approach expanded upon and revised existing understandings of the concept, while fostering new insights and historiographical directions. Following the seminar, the Mosse Program plans to publish two companion volumes: Fascism Then, featuring annotated proceedings from the original 1963 seminar, and Fascism Now, based on the 2025 seminar.
